Third World Food Time Bomb
by Ian Mosley
A genuine demographic time bomb has suddenly made its appearance on the international stage: famine, one of the original “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” Industrialized nations such as the United States and Europe are experiencing sudden food price hikes, but the black and brown peoples of the Third World cannot feed their swelling populations and they are beginning to riot.
The International Herald Tribune reports “Hunger bashed in the front gate of Haiti’s presidential palace. Hunger poured onto the streets, burning tires and taking on soldiers and police. Hunger sent the country’s prime minister packing. Haiti’s hunger, that burn in the belly that so many here feel, has become fiercer than ever in recent days as global food prices spiral out of reach, spiking as much as 45 percent since the end of 2006 and turning Haitian staples such as beans, corn and rice into closely guarded treasures.”
Haiti is so short on food they are literally making “food” out of dirt. One news report notes “In Haiti’s worst slum, Cite Soleil, people actually make and eat mud pies. Now, the dust is collected from the central region of Haiti in an area called Hinche. It’s mixed with water. Here, Myriene Vincent and her son Onelove work, pushing the dirt through a cheesecloth, separating it from twigs and stones and mixing it into a batter.”
The IHT article notes “That anger is palpable across the globe. The food crisis not only is being felt among the poor, but also is eroding the gains of the working and middle classes, sowing volatile levels of discontent and putting new pressures on fragile governments. In Cairo, the military is being put to work baking bread as rising food prices threaten to become the spark that ignites wider anger at a repressive government. In Burkina Faso and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, food riots are breaking out like never before. And in reasonably prosperous Malaysia, the ruling coalition was nearly ousted by disgruntled voters who cited food and fuel hikes as their primary concerns.”
More IHT: “Indeed, as it roils developing nations, the spike in commodity prices - the biggest since the administration of Richard Nixon - has pitted the globe’s poorer south against the relatively wealthy north, adding to demands for reform of rich nations’ farm and environmental policies. But experts say there are few quick fixes to a crisis tied to so many factors, such as strong demand for food from emerging economies like China’s; rising oil prices; and the diversion of food resources to make biofuels.”
A large part of the rising oil prices is due to the insane occupation of Iraq by the United States, which Bush has just announced will continue past January 2009, so that it will be left to his successor to take the responsibility of withdrawing. If that successor is Mr. Potato-Head (McCain) there will be no withdrawal and frankly, most likely no withdrawal by either Hillary or Obama either, since Israel wants American troops in the Middle East to deal with Iran, which means bombing the hell out of them if they turn on their nuclear reactors to generate electricity. Oil companies are also blaming the “diversion of food crops to make ethanol fuel” although I have yet to see one news story about any significantly increased ethanol use in the US. Are we shipping the ethanol overseas? Why don’t we use it here?
Rising food prices and rioting in the Third World means that it will become increasingly difficult for the neocons to maintain their puppet governments in places like Indonesia, Malaysia, Africa and parts of the Muslim world. It will also mean at least some reduction in the non-white world population. On the flip side, it will also increase pressure on the part of the black and brown masses of the world to try and force their way into the remaining white-controlled and therefore food-producing parts of the world such as the United States, Europe, Canada and Australia. Too bad all the presidential candidates are for Amnesty. We could have used a tough-on-immigration president right about now.